How cold is Siberia?

Thought that I would pass on a little tidbit of information about what is called the Pole of Cold! This thinking came about because a good reader of ours commented about the -59 °C. weather we where having in Siberia. So we started to look around.

The Northern Pole of Cold: There are several places in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Siberia, Russia which vie for the honor to be considered the “Pole of Cold”. These are Verkhoyansk and Oymyakon.

An average January temperature in Oymyakon and in some other regions of Yakutia is –47 °C. And this fact let us name it the coldest place of the Northern hemisphere, together with the Greenland. There are a lot of disputes on the issue which place, Oymyakon or Verhojansk, should be named the Northern Pole of cold. The lowest officially recorded temperature in Oymyakon is –67,7 °C and it was registered in 1933. And in Verhojansk this record is –67,8 °C in 1892 (at this time there were no any recordings in Oymyakon). However, in 1924 there was an unofficial recording of the temperature –71,2 °C in Oymyakon, made by academician Sergey Obruchev.

In the Southern hemisphere, the location of the Pole of Cold is much more clearcut: in Antarctica near the Russian (formerly Soviet) Antarctic station Vostok at 78°28′S, 106°48′E. On July 21, 1983, this station recorded a temperature of −89.2 °C (−129.8 °F) This is the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth.